Cato Networks Names Eyal Heiman Chief Technology Officer as Company Expands AI-Powered Platform and Global R&D

Cato Networks, the SASE leader, today announced the promotion of Eyal Heiman to Chief Technology Officer. The move recognizes Heiman’s ongoing leadership of Cato’s global R&D organization and reinforces the company’s continued investment in AI-driven innovation, platform scale, and global engineering talent.

Heiman, who has led Cato’s engineering group for the past six years as Vice President of Engineering, will continue overseeing more than 400 developers across the company’s Israeli headquarters and its recently expanded Prague R&D center — a fast-growing hub helping accelerate Cato’s roadmap across security, networking, and AI.

“Eyal has played a key role in evolving our platform—scaling it, expanding its capabilities across security and networking, and embedding AI at the heart of our architecture,” said Shlomo Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks. “This change simply reflects the leadership he’s already been demonstrating and underscores our commitment to building world-class technology from within.”

Under Heiman’s direction, Cato has embedded platform-native AI capabilities across the Cato SASE Cloud Platform — powering autonomous posture management, AI-assisted incident detection, and safe enablement of LLM use across enterprise environments. These capabilities help CIOs and CISOs simplify operations, reduce risk, and maximize performance at scale.

“Cato is built to simplify the complex,” said Heiman. “We’ve created a platform where security and networking are converged by design, and AI isn’t an add-on — it’s a native advantage. I’m proud to lead a team where every line of code contributes to making enterprise IT faster, safer, and smarter.”

Cato Networks currently serves over 3,500 enterprise customers across more than 190 countries. The company recently announced a $359 million funding round, bringing its total funding to over $1 billion and its valuation to $4.8 billion. Cato was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SASE Platforms, recognized for its unified platform architecture, innovation pace, and customer-centric execution. The expansion of its Prague R&D site marks a key step in Cato’s European growth and a strategic investment in the next generation of SASE platforms.

Cato Networks delivers enterprise security and networking in a single cloud platform. The SASE leader creates a seamless and elegant customer experience that effortlessly enables threat prevention, data protection, and timely incident detection and response. With Cato, organizations replace costly and rigid legacy infrastructure with an open and modular SASE architecture based on SD-WAN, a purpose-built global cloud network, and an embedded cloud-native security stack.

Credit:  Yifat Yogev